


Hollow 3 - Tunnel Through Earth

by AdderTwist



Series: Hollow [3]
Category: X-Men Evolution
Genre: Abandonment, Dysfunctional Family, Familial Abuse, Major Violence, Non-Canon Violence Depiction, Non-Graphic Violence, Part 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-06
Updated: 2010-07-06
Packaged: 2017-10-10 10:19:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdderTwist/pseuds/AdderTwist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is round; once a little girl wanted to dig right through, never knowing the heat and the pressure. In a different life, Wanda has reached the core of the matter, and keeps sinking down; when does down become up?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hollow 3 - Tunnel Through Earth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SandyQuinn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SandyQuinn/gifts).



> This is part three of a trilogy. It is VERY angst-heavy and has the potential to be triggering.  
> This, part three, is Tunnel Through Earth. Preceding that are firstly, The Downward Spiral, and then secondly Further Down The Spiral. I'm afraid that it's just going to get more upsetting until quite close to the end, and even then I wouldn't call the ending 'happy'.  
> This is also the closest this story gets to a resolution.

Wanda was aware that, over time, she had gone softer. It wasn't out of acceptance, but at some point, Pietro had been speaking, enthusiastically, about the speedy growth of bamboo and its uses replacing true wooden utensils, and Wanda had moved past him without issue, fetched herself a glass of milk, and shuffled out of the house.

Pietro had stared after her nervously, fingers tightening around the kitchen knife he'd been holding over the new cutting board, carefully moving. Wanda gritted her teeth, anger lurching up in the pit of her stomach, a familiar pain, but her head was throbbing and there was nothing to be gained.  
Outside, against the building, she'd stacked old milk-crates into a rough staircase along the side of the house, and she shuffled up them quietly.  
Up here, on top of a structurally unsafe building, was the only place she could get anything like quiet. Rage made her stomach feel tight and sour, and her whole head felt too hot and too tight, like it was stretched tight enough to burst, eyes hot and dried out. She sipped milk, stared at nothing, and wished, distantly, that she could just hurry up and kill Magnus. Then nothing much would matter and she could -  
Stop.  
Or something.

She didn't know what she'd do after she murdered the man who'd fathered her, but it hardly mattered. Getting that deed done was the most important thing, and was a difficult task for anyone. He had allies, mindreaders and all, but she was going to have to rely on surprising him.

It occupied most of her time, and so she was surprised when it happened.  
They were attacked.

Of course, fighting the Institute morons was a normal thing. They were always meddling, frustrating, those bastards. They weren't even worth Wanda's time, really, not with how pushed she was beginning to feel. They were just a frustration, and she turned their powers on themselves and raged, and then there were bright lights, helicopters -

The symbol of S.H.I.E.L.D. was looming over her for just a moment, crossed over with a thick orange line, and the roar filled her head; she froze, blind and mute for a crucial split second before Freddie shoved her, sent her tumbling away.

The humans had come in force.

Wanda lashed out, every ounce of her power going into play, backfiring guns and cracking goggles, bringing down helicopters and hurtling debris and metal into them, but there's so many and they've come prepared.

Only a handful of Xavier's brood were here, because it was only meant to be a scuffle against the Brotherhood. The dark-skinned, spiky boy was there, and he was surprisingly good at what he did, spiked out with alarm and flinging shards of brittle bone into the helicopters. Wagner was stealing guns, fleeing across the ruined park in bursts of appropriately hellish brimstone smoke. There was Rogue, idiot girl diving right into the fray with her gloves tugged off. That white-haired woman - Cloud, or whatever she's called, whipping torrential downpour and impossible winds into everyone below, apparently having forgotten that her allies need to be able to stand upright too.

It was a huge, horrible mess of gunfire and shouting and mud and flattened grass and pain. Every mutant was fighting desperately, and... Non-fatally. Everyone - every single mutant was aiming for non-fatal except her. She pressed her lips tightly together, breathed out through her nose, and saw through the blinding deluge enough to see dark blue fur matting with blood in the distance, and a blur of sallow skin heading that way.  
That would serve them ri -

She nearly felt the scream, rather than hearing it. It sang through her bones and her blood, an automatic, terrible clench of iciness in her stomach.  
She didn't have to see it to know that it was Pietro, but she lifted her head anyway. There he was, that moron, arm at a nauseating angle, cracked, gone grey and nauseous from pain, dragging himself out from under a fallen chunk of helicopter. Stupid shit should have been -

There was red on her leg. For a moment she didn't feel it, and then there was an amazing bloom of pain, so intense it winded her, and she gasped quietly to herself, momentarily blind as she fell. (Some tiny part of her mind told her that she was an idiot, a clumsy stupid little bitch, there was mud and blood and all sorts of filthy things in the wound, but there was a much larger part of her screaming, because it felt too big, it felt bigger than her leg, impossibly huge with the pain from it.)  
Every nerve in her body was singing with that pain, for a moment, and then it receded until only her leg is burning, and there was far too much blood, it turned the mud and the rain rich red against her leg, in an increasing circle around her.

She got up, closed her eyes against dizziness and the harsh rise of bile, and kept lurching forward anyway.

Through torrential rain and a throat-closing pain in her leg, she saw the horrified soldiers starting to scatter from her like snow from a burning cinder, scattering blindly.

Only - not so blindly.

The second bullet she barely feels, really, except for the hot wet feeling, ragged in her back, punched right through, and incredulously the touches the blood. The surprise staggered her, and she put too much weight on her shot leg, half-crumpled and forced herself upright, gasping, and feeling like she was choking.

She coughed, blood wet on her already drenched clothes, somehow hotter, more viscous, and she couldn't catch her breath, gasping and feeling a searing, sucking sensation instead. She covered her mouth, doubling over, and now her vision was greying, but she still recognised the froth on her hand as pink, the froth she'd coughed out.

Those fuckers had shot her lung, she thought, and suddenly found standing impossible, crumpling awkwardly onto the ground. The world was dark, and cold. It was really very unpleasant, and she could hear the wet rattling squelch of her breaths, throat crushed into an awkward angle by her fall but having difficulty caring at all.

She got a glimpse of Pietro's tanned, sharp face, still gray from pain, eyes wide and amazed. He pleaded her name out, voice wobbling all over the place, looking stunned and wiped clean with shock, as if surprised that this much pain and despair wasn't killing him. As if surprised that he could be this hurt by anything at all, her blood slick on his hands, soaking into the knees of his trousers mercilessly. His arm, she noted, hung painfully limp, but he didn't seem to notice.  
"Wanda! Stay _awake_ \- "  
And then she had nothing but darkness, sound fading away in her ears. This was probably what dying felt like.

\---

It should have ended there. She should have died, in the mud and the filth and the rain. Maybe that would have made it a kinder world.

Instead, in a haze of cursing, bloody-handed surgeons moving around her, painkillers and a gas which doesn't quite knock her out entirely, she dreams out her own memories, a clinical prodding of unhealed wounds.

The gas they give her keeps her distant, but she needs to be conscious, responsive. Her own voice sounds faraway, so she ignores it, mostly, answering them with whatever of her mind she can spare. The pain that there is, is too far away to bother her.

Of course there are good things to remember, though they belong to another world and a girl who still knew how to feel something other than hollow loathing.

Instead, she remembers (mouth in a wrecked, pained grimace), the hurt of it, Pietro's stricken face pressed to the car window, staring at her from too far away, mirroring her own face pushed urgently into the glass at that dry-dead place. Reflecting each other imperfectly; her miserable, him horrified.

He never visited her there, though, not even once, as if she was wiped cleanly from his mind, a useless, worthless stain of darkness, forgotten in the light of its absence.  
(She doesn't know, she won't know, that he'd never known where that place was, couldn't find it on maps, and had ached with the same dull absence as she had.)

\--

At some point she loses consciousness. She is told, when she wakes, that she almost died, but she stares at the man - ape, big blue ape man thing - until he's finally flinches from the hostility, leaves her in her bitter quietude.

It is a lot later. She is sleepless, in a medical wing surrounded and protected by other freaks. Her leg throbs with fuzzy pain, a drip with some painkiller fed into one of her arms. Breathing hurts, and she is quietly staring upwards, towards the ceiling but looking at nothing, when the cringing fool is abruptly close enough to touch.  
"Hey," he breathes, the moonlight making him sharp-edged, picking out details on him, the glow of it catching the pallor of his hair and cutting his form out in clean lines instead of the glow most people achieve in shadows and moon. His hair is impossibly white, like this.

Her stomach twists with some undefined upset, and she does not manage to suppress her flinch.

 She does not feel any relief to see him, just the faintest dulling of some imagined pain in her arm, the slightest lack of tension in her neck.

He has a cast, she notes. He's trying to hand her a mug of something, rich and dark, steam curling off the surface. It looks black in the bluing light of the moon, and she looks away, feeling her mouth thin, tension at the gesture, the attempt to make peace, which she can recognise but cannot understand.

"I haven't had cocoa since before he left me at that place."  
It's meant to be a warning, meant to make Pietro back away. She feels hollowed out, scraped free of substance like an empty gourd.  
"Do you want it?" he says, and his voice is a whisper. The other residents of this antiseptic-reeking room keep sleeping, oblivious.  
"I don't know," she says, mostly to herself, and then looks at him, still tense, still painfully drawing a blank where she knows she's meant to react somehow. Again she concedes, this time grudgingly to Pietro himself, trying to keep her eyes hostile rather than bleak. "I'll try it."  
She takes the cup obediently, grimacing nonetheless. "And stop - hovering like that," she orders. "Sit down."

Against all logic and reason, he does, suddenly - again, because the speed makes him impossible to keep track of - there, propped on her bed gingerly.

She sips the cocoa, and for a split second, she feels warmed all through, more than the physics of a hot drink can explain.  
The moment passes swiftly; she blanches, hands trembling faintly with pain. Her stomach lurches with the sudden richness, and her heart matches the sick feeling, the sensation of something which it was once accustomed to now too foreign to bear.  
"I - can't," she chokes out, and almost convinces herself that it's just about the wretched drink. "It's too rich."

"Sorry," Pietro murmurs, and the spell is broken, dull, familiar anger washing through her again. Stupid asshole should learn to keep his mouth shut. "I tried to make it chocolatey." She almost points out that 'chocolatey' isn't a word, but she presses her lips together instead, cut off because he opens his mouth again. He continues on obliviously. "You know, to help."

She looks at him, for a moment, really looks, examining the tiny bits of lining on his face, the downturned, thin little mouth. Her heart has that painful sick feeling again and she wants to smash his face, even though the thought makes her stomach lurch with horror, she still wants to destroy him for this. "I - " she begins, but there's no way she can go on without snapping something out, trying to warn him to run, _run_, you idiot child. "You're an idiot. I know what you're trying to do, and - " she keeps going, hearing her tone get desperate instead of harsh, " - it won't work, I'm not a sister anymore, I don't - "

She stops, rubs her face. Her mind feels like wasps and fury and that same lurching, unhappy sickness.

"I know;" he murmurs at her, fiddling absently with his cast and trying to cram his fingers under the plaster. His eyes fix on it instead of her. "you told me."

There is a specific kind of self-destructive that fiddles with something that's already being repaired. Wanda is startled to hear herself almost snarling, voice taut with frustration, "Don't play with your cast, you moron, is your single brain cell shutting down in the cold, it's there for a _reason_."  
She's more agitated than she'd realised by that; her sentence structure slipped.

"It itches," Pietro informs her, and she almost hits him for the sheer stupidity of that statement, but he's smiling at her and she's disturbed (or something else that she won't admit to) by it, so instead she tells him off.  
"Well," she says, exhaustion wearing down the biting tone of her voice, "suck it up, I've got an itch and burn embedded inches into my thigh." She pauses, to scowl at his continuing smile. "What's _that_ look for?"  
She hates it, hates it hates it hates it, the way he's refusing to be daunted away. (She's grateful.) She loathes it.

Pietro, after a brief threat from Wanda, speaks guiltily.  
"I just remembered - " he pauses, glancing down for a moment, and gathers the courage to continue, " - when we were kids. And we had chicken pox, and it was so _itchy_ \- " his tone rises a little for emphasis, settles back down under her stare, " - but we weren't supposed to scratch."  
Wanda doesn't like to think about those things. They belong to the girl and she is not the girl.  
"You hit me with a pillow every time I tried," he reminisces, and she bites her tongue, because now it's playing in her head.

Her voice comes out rusty, and her knuckles have gone white with the pressure she's putting on her mug of cooling cocoa.  
"And there was that terrible oatmeal bath thing, because the lumps really grossed you out, and you sat on top of the fridge for an hour covered in congealing oat."  
Her heart has that sick feeling again, and there's a hollow ache in her throat, behind her eyes. She hasn't shed a tear for years, and it revolts her to think that she almost does now. "Yeah. I - remember, most of the time."

Pietro looks happier to be reminiscing, something soft and tender in his eyes, and Wanda fights the warring urges to kill it, kill it, and to curl close to it, vicariously gathering some sort of contentment like heat from a fire, though she knows that it won't work.  
"You were so stoic. You got lollies or not complaining," he says, and his mouth quirks more. "it was so unfair."

Wanda doesn't just mean that snippet of time when she says, low and weary, "You never did stop fidgeting." The next sip of cocoa leaves her almost gagging, more from the odd pain of reminiscence than anything else.

"I have sensitive skin," he protests.  
She slaps his hand away from his cast, again. "You want to pull out all your arm-hair and damage your skin?"  
"No," he says, grimacing, and glances at her. "You want me to go get your make-up tomorrow?"

Wanda is on safer ground with that; she knows how to order. "And a mirror, I know you've got at least a few stashed."  
He always, she recalls, cared more about his looks than she did.  
He produces a mirror from his pocket, and she's irritated by that. "What'll I do with it now?" she demands, wryly. "It's so I can put on make-up. I feel weird without eyeliner at least."  
"You're still pretty," he assures, and she feels her mouth curl unpleasantly, hostile.  
"Don't suck up, Pietro," she replies lowly. "you have a very busy schedule of boot-licking as it is."  
She can't muster up much fire behind the words, sipping cocoa uncertainly and staring away at the wall.  
"I wasn't." Pietro's response is ridiculously prompt; he's trained well. "Of course you look pretty."

It's a ploy. "No itching under your cast."  
"Yes ma'am." Almost playful, Pietro salutes.

"What's school like?" Her own voice comes as a surprise, after a moment of peace.  
"Boring," Pietro returns. "if you behave. Everyone's so _slow_ with their work." He brightens. "It's fun to pinch things, though, or arrange little pranks."

Silence descends, and then words are more intermittent. At long last, Wanda's headache is being gnawed at faintly by the painkillers, but it dulls her out.

"Any chance you could shave something threatening on Wagner's back?"  
"Threatening?"  
"Or just funny. I am spec_tac_ularly high. I think I'm on morphine. But branding is too permanent." A pause. "Kind of want to make it clear that he doesn't mess with the Brotherhood."

Another pause, and then amusement. "Wanda, are you being protective of _Toad_?"  
"I'm high. I'll be protective of every one of you self-indulgent little creeps if I have to." Another small pause. "Reminds me. Fill Genovese's pillow with dead things, if she upsets Lance."

A gentled tone, now. "Will do. Won't you sleep, Wanda?"  
A slight shift, and a sip of cocoa while she stalls, and then her voice is blunt. "I can't."  
"Want me to sit with you, then? Neither can I."  
"...Yeah. Other side, though. I'm not moving that leg."

A quiet yawn as he shuffles onto the bed.

"Well, get comfy. What are you waiting for, a specially signed note?" She hunches around her cup, sipping again, and tolerates Pietro snuggling in against her, just a tiny bit, messing with the covers, his hair and clothes, before finally stilling. His eyes close, and Wanda stares for a moment, rearranges the covers over him, and waits.

She remembers. When Pietro is asleep, he mumbles softly.

She finishes her cocoa, mutely, and is careful to keep her movements calculated. Pietro doesn't stir.  
Eventually, uncertainly, once she's sure that nobody can observe, she swallows down the angry burn in her throat, puts an arm carefully around him, and tilts her head back to look at the ceiling.

  
Unexpectedly, she sleeps for almost two hours before the needle-dreams stir her again, and then he's nestled in against her side, cast propped on her stomach.

  
"You don't understand," she tells the empty air, and Pietro's sleep-softened, exhausted face. Her voice comes out hoarse, bitter, low. She feels like - like a changeling, like something from a harsher, fiercer world, a rip of shadows and fury usurping the role of Pietro's twin sister, warping the world.  
She tightens her hold around his shoulders, just slightly, eyelids drooping, imagining some sweet girl who knows how to be soft, how to not make things worse, and glares furiously at the ceiling, useless and futile. Let that sweeter girl come. Wanda hates her, too, weak and quiet, and envies her with a painful burn her throat, bile and blind anger.

"I wonder if I do," she adds, and feels her mouth twist into a brutal curve.


End file.
